I had a childhood in motels, growing up in the friendly
confines of the leather back seats of a couple of company cars, a
green 1972 Buick Electra with white leather and a pumpkin-colored
1974 Cadillac Eldorado with pumpkin-colored leather, criss-crossing
the continent, and sleeping in Holiday Inns.

Every morning at breakfast, Dad would pull out his
itinerary from this briefcase, and pull out the thick national paperback
Holiday Inn guide from its transparent stiff mylar bracket in the
middle of the restaurant table next to the jelly caddy, and decide
that tonight would be Van Wert, or Sundance, or Cortland, or whatever.
I loved to look at that national guide and its small location maps
with a collect them all frame of mind. Dad would make the next
night's reservations at the front desk through their Holidex system,
back when networked computers were objects of wonder and fear, and
then we'd finish breakfast, repack, and hit the road.

These were the good years for Holiday Inn.

They were the first national motel chain and they
had a lock on the industry for years in an invincible network of small
towns and outskirts. No need to stay anywhere else. Casper Wyoming
room 213 and Van Wert Ohio room 107, or any two Holiday Inn rooms
chosen at random by Holidex, were indistinguishable like two cross-section
slabs of interstate concrete, and the psychological effect was to
reduce the Holiday Inn room to an abstract, a placeless ideal. (Picture
Dad checking the phone book cover or calling down to the front desk
first thing to find out where the hell he was.)

This kind of existential nightmare was profitable
and the only organized competition was Ramada, and they weren't worth
bothering about. Holiday Inn was like a utility in the late 60's,
an untouchable utility, with new properties sprouting up overnight
at major intersections like Wal-Marts did ten years ago. A great success
story, a powerful brand, a cash machine.

I was a kid, and an oblivious kid at that. So I have
vivid and fond memories of specific sensations, like the bit of shiny
curled foil separated from the top of the strawberry jam packages,
and the small aluminum burrs on the unsmoothed door jambs that would
catch the flesh of your fingertips if you weren't careful, and the
supercold metal ice scoop in the humming ice machine, and the wide
brown elastic bands under the two chairs, and the sanitary strips
on the toilet seat, the taste of swimming pool water, local newscasters
from other cities always different and always the same, and after
bed the overnight concert of highway noises especially if the motel
was close to a bumpy overpass on a major road (it always was), and
that weird sensation of always being somewhere else in the same
place, a sensation I've never been able to shake. The most magic
part, though, was --

The Sign.

The Sign.

With an orange neon column supported a field of green;
the green field was bordered on the outside and top by a high yellow
arrow which helpfully pointed toward the motel. The words 'Holiday
Inn' were written on that field of green in that stylized cursive.
Below the letters was a white rectangle where the maintenance man
hung letters like 'MEXICAN BUFFET 3.95' or 'FREE COLOR TV'.

There was a curved orange bulkhead around the white
rectangle, hugging the ground. And a holy white star surmounted the
orange column with its own cartoony markings of radiance, see photograph.

I remember one night in particular, after driving
300 north miles across Texas from San Antonio at night, coming into
Waco from the south. The Waco property was on a big hill next to the
highway, and you could see that big recklessly attractive hyperkinetic
green neon from fifty miles away, first as a tiny detail in the endless
Texan darkness, an illusion intermittently blotted out by night, real
then not real, then a live possibility. Are we almost there?

One thing Holiday Inn learned from the small-town
motels they drove out of business was this: a motel needs a big, bright
sign. The collision of the Holiday Inn chain and the neon tradition
of the individual motel sign produced this American icon, this hypnotic
visual splash, part of the postwar atomic-futurismo roadside architecture
of transport, born of that world of interstate highways, drive-in
movies, service stations, 'googie' coffeeshops and motels. I remember
approaching its mystical attraction and touching it, wondering if
I would make the magic leak out.

According to a short article in the August 1983 Harper's,
it took 426 light bulbs and 836 feet of hand-blown neon tubing to
achieve that postwar exuberance. Holiday Inns, Inc. referred to it
as 'The Great Sign' in the 1983 press release, the press release which
announced they were junking it, nation-wide, for a dumpy brown rectangle
which was corporate Holiday Inn's agonizingly lame excuse for a replacement.

This Great Sign, as wonderful as it
is, was only the standardized and widely replicated version of the older
and more exciting independent motel's signs which were all over the
continent. The Holiday Inn sign was dull compared to fabricated illusions
for motels called The Continental, The Riveria, Castaways, Caravan,
Trade Winds, El Rancho, things like that, like the famous 1934 Steele's
Motel sign from Los Angeles, featuring a girl neon diver, who twists
in three consecutive positions before disappearing into the pool over
and over and over. I think it's her persistence that's so attractive.

The signs were crazy gestures, exuberant, ecstatic,
extra-ordinary and vulgar, especially in contrast to the other features
of these withered midwestern towns, and after a long dose of road-hypnosis
on the dark highway, after 100 empty miles of the murky darkness of
midnight flatland Texas, that thing would just crash into your eyes.
It was a lighthouse that meant an empty bed just for you, free ice,
color TV, sleep -- a nuclear ice palace in a desert of darkness, a
clear indication of paradise, satori in Van Wert.

In the morning daylight, if you stood across the street
and looked carefully, you could see that the motel building and the
motel sign were locked in a death grip. Visually and functionally
they were exact opposites who hated each other but needed each other
to survive. You know, like GM and the UAW.

The sign was a creature of speed and fantasy and illusion.
The sign stood up proudly and belonged to the road. The sign presented
a whole nonsensical and liberating illusion about the motel, its fantasy-oriented
identity captured in the name and the neon . Only then could you find
Camelot in Tulsa ("firetrap" Mom said). The Riveria, The
Tropical Inn, Castaways, Caravan, Trade Winds, El Rancho. The sign
didn't appear to be materially real, much less economically real,
and in its scale aimed to the highway it seemed superhuman, what,
25 or 30 feet up.

The motel, on the other hand, was a thing of restrictive
utility and permanent hard fact. It was horizontal and inconspicuous.
It belonged to the town. The technical term for a one-story-individual-exterior-room-entry
motel shape is "down-and-out". The motel buildings were
uniformly concrete and steel construction, cut-rate International
styling, colored masonite panels on aluminum grids, etc. Brutal economic
reality was obvious inside and out and this thing about The Riveria?
El Rancho? Whopping lies. An illusion was the only identity this building
could claim. Hard put to find anywhere on the Riveria or the Mexican
frontier where the t.v. was bolted to the dresser, the hangers were
unstealable, the table bolted to the floor, and the guests trusted
only what wasn't worth stealing, like the Bible.

And that was a long time ago. Corporate misjudgements,
determined competition, and OPEC reduced Holiday Inn to a smaller
niche in the industry.

By about, um, 1976, the Holiday Inn monopoly slipped
through their fingers, and the company had a nervous breakdown. The
original signs came down, traded in for a brown rectangle with rounded
corners, a design that is physically difficult to even focus on. Then
came "The Best Surprise Is No Surprise", deathless promise
of diminished expectations, aimed more to employees than guets. Right
now Holiday Inn stays alive only because of real estate tax law, and
brand recognition which is still incredibly high in the 50-80 ages
relative to all competitors.